


Bleeding Out

by Infini



Series: Forgive and Forget [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Amputation, Blood, Blood Drinking, Bodily Fluids, Body Horror, Food Kink, Graphic Description, Isolation, M/M, Psychological Horror, Robogore, Sharing Body Heat, Survival Horror, Zero Gravity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-17 09:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1382569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Infini/pseuds/Infini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not dying was by chance.</p><p>Living was by choice.</p><p>Survival is not a clean business, but Rewind chose to live, by whatever means necessary.  If it left his hands dirty, so be it; there was no one but Primus here to judge him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _'Cause I'm bleeding out_   
>  _So if the last thing that I do_   
>  _Is to bring you down_   
>  _I'll bleed out for you_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> \- Imagine Dragons, _Bleeding Out_

The first thought was, rather predictably, that he was dead.

The second was that he’d had no idea the AllSpark would be so cold.  Or dark.  Or full of system errors and damage reports.

It only took a few moments to figure out _that_ wasn’t right.  There were a lot of stories about what happened after you died, and he’d heard more than most.  He remembered them too, though at the moment they were rather difficult to pull up from his drives.  Too many warnings in the way.

He was in pain, he realized.  Everything everywhere ached, all at once, in a distant sort of way.  If this was supposed to be the AllSpark, the afterlife, the eternal plane where you spent the remainder of existence until all truly became one… it seemed like something had gone wrong.

Or, the idea trickled in as something small bounced off his faceplate, maybe he wasn’t as dead as he thought.

Slogging through the alerts felt like it took ages, weeks and months and years where he was suspended in nothing, without moving or venting or feeling anything beyond the steady background of pain.  But the errors were familiar, if only because he’d lived long enough and been through enough to have seen most before, at one point or another.  With this many all at once, it was obvious he needed a medic.  Ratchet?  Ratchet could fix this.  Ratchet and his new hands, that seemed to have breathed new life into the CMO in spite of the rather gruesome manner he’d come into possession of them.  It was quite a story.  He wished he’d been there to record it.

No time for that now, though.  He had to find Ratchet, or First Aid, or Ambulon, or at least someone who could locate a doctor for him.  All these errors were signs that he was in pretty rough shape, and he might not be able to make it to the medbay on his own.  Honestly, he was used to asking for help, on things far less important than this.  The world was built for mechs much larger than himself, and you couldn’t get too far if you were determined to handle everything on your own.  There were plenty of people he could rely on.

Something large and solid bumped up against him, or maybe he was the one who gently knocked against it.

_Domey?_

The word didn’t come out.  It was confusing, almost alarming; he’d felt his vocalizer activate, sensed the minor alarms that popped up from the effort, but there was nothing.  Not even a burst of static to show he’d tried.  His audials weren’t in great shape, but they should still have picked up some sort of sound.  Was there more wrong with him than he thought?

Ignoring the protests from his processors, he pushed his optics online.

At first, he thought the impenetrable darkness stemmed from lagging systems, but it neither brightened nor resolved itself into something more comprehensible.  A jab of pain made him wince, lifting a hand to cover the offending lens, but that just inspired his arm to raise the subject of its own sharp pain.

A sudden spray of fuschia floated across his vision, tiny glowing droplets and larger quivering globules arcing away from the arm he’d moved.  He stared, singular optic following their path; some collided with a formless black mass, while others ricocheted off and vanished into further darkness.

It was energon.  His energon.  And he suddenly couldn’t decide whether the greater concern was that he was bleeding, or that his vision wasn’t just malfunctioning.  Painfully long moments were spent digging up night-vision protocols, long disused and buried under years of more relevant files.  The activation stung distantly, but it was worthwhile to see the black void that surrounded him suddenly snap into focus.

He was in a cage.  The bars were huge, almost as thick as his torso, arching overhead while he hung in midair.  More of the fluorescent droplets were vanishing through spaces between the massive pillars, scattering to join equally luminescent dots beyond.  There was scarcely enough space to move, which was why any motion resulted in jarring collision, but closer inspection showed that the bars were only connected to the… floor?  ceiling? wall? at one end.  Was the gap large enough to let him squeeze free?  He reached out to grab onto one, intent on dragging himself free with the hand not currently covering his optic.

Except there was no hand at the end of the arm.

The motion sent more fuel flying, splattering against the bars without a sound.  He couldn’t stop from locking his stare onto the broken limb, its bare splintered metal and broken wiring, the thin lines of tubing beading up with energon. His arm looked like it had been crushed, or sheared-

_“Don’t do this!”_

_There was a hand reaching through the gap, but he didn’t realize until it was too late._

_“Please, please, PLEASE don’t do this!”_

_The sword popped free at the same moment he tried to speak, and there wasn’t time to turn the sound into something better than an exclamation.  The resulting scream was cut short as the doors slammed shut._

_Chromedome’s voice wasn’t the only thing severed._

He shoved himself through the gap between what were not prison bars, and what was definitely not a floor.  The feeling of paint scraping off scarcely registered through a flood of other warnings, and pain that seemed determined to reach every inch of him at once.  On the other side was twisted wreckage and floating debris, shredded bits of Cybertronian and slow-cell, suspended in empty space.  But he didn’t notice his surroundings, the icy void, or the stars that blinked against the dark.

Rewind stared into the lifeless face of Overlord.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _So I bare my skin_  
>  _And I count my sins_  
>  _And I close my eyes_  
>  _And I take it in_  
>  _I'm bleeding out_  
>  _I'm bleeding out for you, for you._  
>     
> \- Imagine Dragons, _Bleeding Out_

It was a struggle to keep a grip on the tubing, its slippery polymer composition made worse by pink liquid coating the digits that attempted to hold it steady.

_Nothing they did made a difference.  Half the crew was piling onto Overlord, who tore through them like… like the sparkeater had chewed through those turbofoxes.  He knew his handguns weren’t going to do anything, but he kept firing; they couldn’t just give up.  And it helped him concentrate on something other than the fact that Chromedome was nowhere to be seen._

Vents hitched, though there was no atmosphere for them to take in, and Rewind tried to concentrate.  He had dozens of medical videos on file; four separate clips detailed exactly how to tie fuel lines.  Ligation wasn’t complicated, he just had to focus.

_“Rewind?”_

_A singular, quiet word.  He shouldn’t have heard it over the din of battle, but he did.  He’d know that voice anywhere._

_“Chromedome!  Over here!”_

If he didn’t tie this, if he couldn’t tie all the others, he would die.  He was already bleeding out, thin trails of glowing energon dancing among the debris.  Not all of it was his, but the more he lost, the less time he’d have.

_“I thought you were dead!”_

_They both spoke at the same time.  The pistols dropped as relief flooded through every system, freeing up both hands so he could reach out and grab him, touch him, hold onto him, to prove he was alive and real and solid.  Chromedome scooped up the diminutive frame, but instead of moving away from the fighting, he darted around the edge of the melee, toward Drift._

_Domey put him down.  And then he started to talk to the injured mech._

With only one hand, tying ligatures was exponentially harder.  When that hand was slick with leaking fuel, it was even worse.  His digits slipped, and another spurt of fuchsia added colour to the endless black.

_“Chromedome?  What’s this all about?”_

_They were saying things he didn’t understand, or maybe he didn’t want to understand.  Trepan’s Trigger.  Mnemonic terrain.  Brainstorm.  Back-up plan._

_“What have you been-”_

_But he already knew, didn’t he?_

Rewind grabbed the line and squeezed, cutting off the escaping energon.  But while he held onto one, there were a dozen more doing the same thing.  There were some he couldn’t hope to reach; how would he stopper them?

_He followed, when Chromedome ran down the stairs.  He wasn’t sure why he did it; maybe his emotional circuits were fritzing to the point where he wasn’t thinking clearly.  Maybe, despite everything, despite what he knew was coming, he still didn’t want to let Chromedome out of his sight._

_“You’re angry.”_

_He didn’t know what he felt, but angry didn’t cover it.  He was furious.  He was horrified.  Hurt.  Disappointed. Sickened._

_‘Betrayed’ was the word he hadn’t been able to summon._

_“I really don’t know if I can forgive you for this.”_

There was no atmosphere to project sound as he sobbed, damaged frame shaking as it curled in on itself.  Even if he managed to somehow stop the leaking, it wouldn’t do him any good.  The _Lost Light_ was gone, half his systems were redlining, and he was floating in open space, alone except for the unconscious body of a mass-murderer.  

_In retrospect, he hadn’t done it for Chromedome.  Not really.  He’d done it for everyone, because it was the right thing to do, because he_ could. _His whole life had been spent watching other people looking out for him, fighting for him; bigger mechs, stronger mechs, faster mechs. People who could make a difference, while he stood back and watched._

_This was something only he could do._

_Chromedome was calling him, reaching for him, and he didn’t stop. There was barely enough time to devote to searching, saving, and popping the miniature drive from his wrist._

_The door slammed shut, and a burst of energon coloured the air._

There was no knowing if Overlord if or when was going to wake up.  He was a Phase Sixer, and while he wanted to believe Cyclonus’ assertions that anyone could be killed, the fact that he’d survived this explosion wasn’t lending any weight to that belief.  Just being enclosed by one of his massive hands had been enough to keep a mech as small and fragile as Rewind alive.

_A massive shadow fell over him, and he turned away from the small and circular window despite already knowing the cause._

_Never, in his categorically long life, had he seen anything as terrifying as that smile._

_“What good luck,” Overlord purred, lips curling back to bare dentae.  “I’d been worried I was going to break my promise...”_

_A hand as large as his entire frame blotted out the red lights above.  There was nowhere to run.  He didn’t bother trying._

Was this it, then?  Was he giving up, after how much fighting and winning and losing and living?  He’d lived through millions of years of war, it wasn’t their enemies that had killed him, but his friends.  His more-than-best friend.

Maybe the worst part was that he still believed in Chromedome.  The yelling, the digits straining to reach him, the look in his optics through the red-tinted glass: he knew he’d done the wrong thing, for so many reasons.  And even if Rewind couldn’t forgive him, not then, not yet, he still loved him.  In spite of what he’d done, said some; because of it, said Rewind, because he knew what Chromedome had been before, and what he could be in the future.

It was impossible to change someone else, no matter how badly you wanted to, but you could help them change themselves.

He knew Chromedome.  He knew that he would carry this forever, the same way he did everything else in his past.  They’d been trying so hard to work past it, learning to let go of the weights that dragged him down, and they hadn’t succeeded yet.  Without support, he’d crumble under the weight again.

_I really don’t know if I can forgive you for this._

Rewind could forgive a lot, he knew.  Probably more than most.  Chromedome knew it too.

_Be brave._

He had said they’d _talk._  He didn’t immediately try to defend himself. He didn’t throw up arguments or counter-accusations.  There had been no sarcasm, no biting exasperation in response to the anger.  He knew he was wrong.

_Be strong._

That was why he’d needed to leave the message.  His last words to the one he cared about most couldn’t be blame, or else everything they’d gone through together would be for nothing.

_And keep going without me._

If there was only one thing that came from all this, Rewind wanted it to be that Chromedome learned to live by himself.  For himself.  Not alone, because there was such a big difference between ‘by yourself’ and ‘alone’, but so that he didn’t feel like he always needed someone to hold him up.  He was strong enough.  He just needed to realize it.

The shivering had ebbed away, leaving every plate and wire and strut aching from damage and cold.   His digits were still wrapped around the singular piece of piping, crushing it into submission while others continued their slow drip into the vacuum.  Debris swirled, dancing lazy circles around Phase Sixer and minibot alike, until collisions sent them skittering out of their orbits.  The stars watched indifferently as Rewind shifted, pressing himself a little more tightly into the space between Overlord’s digits as he turned his attention to the leaking tube.

He wanted Chromedome to live.  And, if their positions had been reversed, Domey would have wanted the same thing from him.  Giving up would make him a hypocrite; even if he couldn’t win, he still had to try.

Rewind twisted the tubing with energon-slick digits, pulling up the record from his databanks once again. Until there was nothing left of him to fuel it, he chose to hope.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Oh, you tell me to hold on_   
> _Oh, you tell me to hold on_   
> _But innocence is gone_   
> _And what was right is wrong_
> 
> \- Imagine Dragons, _Bleeding Out_

It had been impossible to reach all of the leaking pieces of his body, but Rewind had managed to stopper most of them.  Only small tubes which he could neither tie nor pinch shut with bits of wire or debris remained, weeping droplets of fuchsia as he crawled his way across the massive frame underneath him.

Or above him, he mused while searching for another place to wedge his damaged arm.  There was no gravity here, which made it extremely difficult to move from one place to another: one wrong move, or a little too much force, and you would lose your grip and be sent flying.  With most of his legs gone, as well as the hand on one arm, Rewind was far from properly equipped to spend time climbing across Overlord’s chassis.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have a choice.

Survival was not a clean business.  It was dirty, disgusting, and filled with things most mechs would recoil from, if given half a chance.  Even in war, most didn’t see it.  Battle was simple and tidy by comparison: you killed or were killed, shot or were shot, stabbed or were stabbed.  Survival came afterward, when your damaged chassis was dragged back to the medics for repair.  It took a special spark to become a doctor, and Rewind was beginning to learn the reasons the majority kept to their own kind.  Once you chose survival, had it placed in your hands, knew what it would take to keep that guttering light alive… things changed.  Things which could not be changed back.

He could not survive alone, that much was clear.  Cybertronians could operate in many environments, even the void of space; he and Chromedome had spent hours standing on the outside of the _Lost Light_ , magna-clamps on their pedes.  But it was always him who decided what time they would return to the warmth of the ship, because his small frame could not hold heat as long.  In this void, there was no safe place to retreat to, and with half his systems already damaged, he needed to keep up a tolerable internal temperature.

By contrast, Overlord was massive; his frame had cast shadows over all but the largest mechs on the ship.  His armour was nearly impenetrable, and even in stasis, his body seemed relatively undamaged.  Stable.  And warm.

It had made fuel prickle in the back of Rewind’s throat, but there was no other choice.  He needed Overlord to stay alive, and that meant he had to repair him, to the best of his ability: after tying off as many tubes as he could on his own chassis, the minibot had begun doing the same for the enormous Decepticon.  He was slowly making his way across the damaged body, stopping wherever he found loose wiring or open wounds to try and stem the energon bleed.  The fixes were neither elegant nor particularly gentle, and there were already a few places that he could tell he’d need to go back and try again.  Progress was slow, painfully so in more ways than one, but there were no other options.

He needed Overlord.

Half-burying himself inside the leaking remnants of a monster’s arm was something he never wanted to do again.  But he’d only finished one, and the other seemed more badly damaged than the first.  There was also his chest, and he had yet to see what condition the giant’s back might be in.  Much like Rewind himself, Overlord’s legs had suffered the worst; they were shredded to the endoskeleton, bits of armour and dangling wiring clinging to the base material, along with a cloud of fluorescent liquid energon.

Plugging so many leaks took a long time, long enough that his systems had begun quietly pinging him, little alerts to say his fuel levels were reaching uncomfortably low levels.  Near-panic was cut abruptly short when he pulled his hand free of the piping he was trying to tie, sending a shower of rose droplets scattering across his cracked visor.

Of course.

Rewind snapped open his mask, never having been more glad for the fact that he’d been forged with a mouth beneath it.  If the mask had truly been his faceplate, the way Chromedome’s was…  It was easy to drink energon with a straw normally, but suction didn’t work in a vacuum.

Survival was not a clean business, but he made sure to lick his digits every few minutes, whenever the fuchsia coating began interfering with his work.  More than once it threatened to climb back up his throat when he thought too hard, but slowly his fuel indicators returned to acceptable levels.  And he kept going.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _When the sky turns gray_   
> _And everything is screaming_   
> _I will reach inside_   
> _Just to find my heart is beating_
> 
>  
> 
> \- Imagine Dragons, _Bleeding Out_

Dare he be glad that he was making progress?  Painful and painfully slow it might be, but the massive Decepticon’s legs were no longer surrounded by trails of luminous fuschia, and his chest had been checked over to make sure none of the major fuel lines had been punctured.  After resting inside the latter for a while, far too close to Overlord’ spark chamber to think about, he crawled back out and continued.  Just one arm and his back remained, and while Rewind had yet to get a good look at how much damage there might be, he knew the majority of the task must be behind him.

Digits carefully curled into a transformation seam as he pulled himself across one hip, dragging his damaged arm over the plating until he found a large enough gap to lodge it into.  This was, without a doubt, the most time-consuming part of his task: the only upside was that it took so much concentration, he had no time or ability to think about himself and his situation.

Wedge, shift, pull; grab, shift, pull.  Every movement had to be careful and calculated, or else he’d find himself on a section of chassis with nowhere to go but backward.  Rewind had footage of some mechs who enjoyed climbing sheer cliffs in robot mode; while it might be a somewhat understandable hobby for flyers, the fact that grounders would do it too made no sense to him at all.  Who would subject themselves to being suspended so high above the ground, with nothing to hold onto but a surface that might crumble beneath your hands?  He hadn’t found the idea appealing then, and it was no more so now.  One wrong choice, a slip of digits, was the difference between life and death.

Rewind thought about it, and stopped paying attention.

A slip of digits.

Suddenly his frame slid sideways, hand pulling free of the seam he’d attempted to grab.  Shock and fear shot through him, and he pitched forward to try and retake the hold; instead, his other arm was jarred loose, and with a soundless cry, the minibot saw Overlord’s frame float out of reach.

He screamed, not that it made a difference in the vacuum, and thrashed, as though it might somehow inspire gravity to suddenly draw him back to solid metal.  It didn’t, of course; physics was as unsympathetic as the distant stars that stared down at him, and Rewind drifted further from his singular source of safety against certain death.

_No, no, no no nonononono-_

Some small and sharp piece of metal jabbed into one pauldron before bouncing off, temporarily forcing back the terror swimming up through his body and mind.  He couldn’t panic; losing the ability to think rationally was a death sentence.

_Not that this isn’t_ , said the viciously black voice of fear, but Rewind shoved it down again.  He wouldn’t give up, couldn’t give up, until there was nothing left of him to hope with.

More debris pinged against his plating. It seemed he’d floated into the cloud of wreckage that surrounded Overlord.  Though not as dangerous as acid rain, the near-constant shower of shrapnel was painful, and made it even harder to keep his mind clear.  Rewind could practically hear the sound of a dozen little impacts against his plating, just in case the sparks of pain weren’t enough of a distraction, but he squeezed himself as tightly as he could with what was left of his arms, and tried to think.

The archivist searched his databanks for everything on spaceflight, zero-gravity environments, the effects of severe temperature variance and UV exposure on the Cybertronian body…  Even if what he found wasn’t reassuring, the familiar process of dredging up information kept his spark from spiralling out of control.  Only shuttleformers and other spacefaring frames had an instinctual understanding of how to move, act, and react in space; his programming was most definitely gravity-based, and that was working against him.  What he needed was to trust the facts he found, and then apply them exactly-

Something large hit him in the back and he gasped, vents shocked open by pain and allowing more of his collected warmth to escape.  The biting cold sent more agony up damaged sensory wiring and Rewind doubled over, remaining digits biting into his palm as he tried to keep hold of himself.

He needed help.  He’d always needed help; he had been a disposable-class, tiny and weak and worthless until someone else gave him value.  The universe was made for bigger mechs, stronger mechs, and even when he was free that hadn’t changed.  War had only exacerbated it, proving that he was too small to use weapons with any degree of power, and his frame too delicate to support the kind of upgrades necessary to defend himself from larger soldiers.

Rewind had never forgotten how terrifying it was, those first weeks and months after Dominus disappeared.  That hole had left him a homeless disposable again; powerless, worthless, a waste of space at best, and a liability (or an easy mark) at worst.  The badge on his back was as much a target as a shield during the feverish, desperate search for his one and only source of safety.

But he hadn’t found Dominus.  He’d met Chromedome.

Somewhere, between the snark and cynicism and all the things that lay underneath, his fear had ebbed away.  At the beginning, he stayed around because it was safer than nothing at all; it took an embarrassingly long time for him to realize why he kept coming back, even after his place in the Autobot ranks was secure.  Somewhere along the line, that glowing gold visor had become home.

Under cold blue stars, it wasn’t Dominus he begged that Primus send to save him.

Now he was a million miles from home, and probably further still from anything resembling safety.  There was only one person he could rely on, and only one sure source of continued existence: he had to have both, or else he would end up just like the rest of the space debris, lazily turning in the black.

Carefully, Rewind pulled himself together, and tried to plan.  He’d found a lengthy document on the physics of jet propulsion in space, and while most of the language went over his head, a few word-searches found something promising. On a planet, objects eventually slowed down and stopped because of gravity.  In space, there was no gravity to slow things down; motion continued forever, in a straight line, until something altered or stopped it.

The painful collision with whatever struck him had stopped his movement away from Overlord.  He was on a sort of sideways trajectory now, joining the expanding cloud of debris.  What he needed was another collision, one that would send him back toward the giant frame…  But how?  Something would need to be already moving in the direction he wanted to go, in order for him to steal its inertia.  The chance of something with the right trajectory passing within arm’s reach of him was too miniscule to calculate.  He’d either freeze or run out of fuel, before that ever happened.

The amount of low-temperature warnings building up put a rather fine point on that.

If he couldn’t steal momentum, he would need to create it.  Another unquantifiable time was spent scraping his archives for more information, but he was lucky enough to find results.  Just one result.  It was a simple thing: ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’, but when the principle was applied to motion, its implications were far more practical: the force required to move an object was reflected back at whatever was exerting the force.  Whatever Rewind collided with had bounced off, its own trajectory changed as much as his had been.  If he could make something move, in an equal and opposite trajectory to what he wanted for himself…

It took a while before anything more than hand-sized rubble passed within grabbing distance, but he finally managed to get a hold of something that appeared to have been part of the door.  The archivist had latched onto it with as much strength as he could muster, flattening himself against the panel that was nearly as large as his torso.  The added effect of his mass had slowed it down considerably, and also caused it to begin rotating, but Rewind didn’t care.  All he had to do was wait until he was certain his back was to Overlord, and then push off as hard as he could.

It worked, and something like joy fluttered in his spark for a single second.

Immediately after that, he realized that his push hadn’t stopped the rotation; it had accelerated it.  His damaged frame began to flip, end over end, giving him a brief view of where he was headed before spinning out of sight again.  What if he hit his target sideways, or backwards?  He’d never be able to grab on, and he’d lose his momentum.  The Decepticon was much more massive than him, which meant that he’d bounce.  Who knew how long it would take him to reach another piece of suitably-sized debris, if he even managed to float into the cloud before freezing up entirely? He might simply hover a few feet away, forever out of reach...

This time, Rewind couldn’t control his panic.  He reached out into the void, clawing at safety long before he came close enough to touch it.  Still worse, his trajectory had been off: instead of colliding broadside with the huge blue frame, one pauldron smacked against a protruding plate, sending him spiralling out of control.  Digits scrabbled at paint and smooth metal, sparks flying and pain searing as he tried desperately to find something to grab. His hand dug into a bare patch of endoskeleton and protometal with energon from reopened lines spattering across his face as inertia pulled him away-

A hard, forceful jerk.

He held on.

And suddenly, he wasn’t moving any more.

Rewind stared at the mess of wiring and tubes his hand was buried in, looking without really seeing.  Slowly he pulled himself closer, broken arm reaching out to hook over an exposed  grate so he could extricate his digits from the mess.  Pink liquid floated in globules, droplets, and strings as he carefully wrapped both arms around the leg he’d managed to latch onto, and sobbed with silent relief.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _When the hour is night_   
> _And hopelessness is sinking in_   
> _And the wolves all cry_   
> _To fill the night with hollering_
> 
>  
> 
> \- Imagine Dragons, _Bleeding Out_

He’d dug around inside shattered plating and shredded protometal.  He tied knots in leaking tubing, and twisted sparking wires back into what space was left behind. He had licked half-spent energon from his digits.  Single-handedly, in the most literal sense, he was responsible for keeping one of the most dangerous, cruel, and hated Decepticons from dying.

None of that disgusted him as much as this.

Rewind knew he needed heat.  He’d managed to cancel or shunt aside most of the warnings that would pop up whenever he moved, but that only gave the low-temperature notifications greater prominence.  There wasn’t much antifreeze left in him, and what little remained was slowly leaking from the cracked tank in his lower back; he’d given up wasting it on the damaged arm, and cut off circulation to everything but his helm, core, and remaining hand.  It didn’t change the fact that his levels were dropping, but it kept his pistons from freezing up.

After finishing as many patches and ligatures as he could manage on Overlord’s back, he’d succumbed to the need for an exterior source of warmth.  The slow process of crawling back onto the Decepticon’s chest had left his joints creaking with frozen buildup.  By the time he managed to shove himself into the gap between pectoral plating and the frame that supported it, his visor had begun to frost over from the various splattered fluids.  He had been scarcely able to move, much less think about what he was doing, when he latched onto the nearest source of warmth and slid out of consciousness.

That hadn’t been so bad.  The real unpleasantness was when he’d warmed enough to wake up again, and realized he’d wrapped himself around the thrumming metallic cylinder of Overlord’s spark chamber.

It took a lot of calm, rational thought for Rewind to convince himself not to climb back out and take his chances on the outside of the Decepticon’s chassis.  First and foremost, he would freeze to death: there was no question about it, not once he’d experienced the effects of prolonged exposure.  He had already decided that he wouldn’t let himself die, not when there was something left he could do to avoid it.

He could do this, no matter how tank-churning the very idea might be.  It was a matter of survival.  If the difference between life and death was feeling the thrum of the monstrous spark beneath his digits, through his plating, against his chest-

His throat tubing worked hard, swallowing down the energon that threatened to escape.  He couldn’t afford to waste fuel, not when it was still leaking from the lines he had no wayof tying shut.  Even now, energon was congealing along his spinal struts and seeping into his waist articulation.  Survival was dirty, disgusting, and filled with things most would recoil from, if given half a chance.  But Rewind had no chance, without this, and it was that thought that forced him to share space with the steely chamber.

It wasn’t wrong, he repeated to himself, over and over like a mantra.  It wasn’t trading someone else’s life for his own.  It wasn’t causing damage or harm.  It didn’t break any of the promises he’d made…

Would Chromedome be angry?

It was a train of thought he didn’t want, but Rewind didn’t have strength left to jump off the tracks. His conjunx was the jealous type; always had been, always would be.  He held grudges, he had a temper, and he took his bad moods out on everyone around him.  Love wasn’t seeing a perfect person, but an imperfect person, perfectly…  Chromedome hated those kinds of platitudes, and his reactions were the reason Rewind loved to toss them in his direction.

That cynicism was a front, to a certain extent.  Snark and sarcasm as a shield, keeping things at arm’s length so they wouldn’t get close enough to hit something vital.  It had taken a lot of persistence to get past that, but the rewards had been worth it.

All the arguments.  All the silent treatments.  All the stupid things, both large and small…  The archivist would put up with the lot of them, happily, if he could just see him again.

Maybe Chromedome would hate what he’d done. Maybe now, he wouldn’t want him back… if he even managed to survive this.  Despite all this effort, the chances of rescue were infinitesimal.  Who knew how long it would be before another ship came this way?  Eve if one did, what were the chances that they’d notice a tiny debris field, orbiting a single barely-functional Cybertronian?  It was possible, probable, likely, almost certain that all his efforts had only served to drag out his own death.

He shivered, revulsion twisting among broken systems as he dragged himself closer to the sole source of heat.  Offlining his optics against the slivers of green light that danced through the maze of internal wiring, Rewind tried to ease himself into stasis.  This was as safe as he was going to get, and attempting to remain conscious for Primus-knows-how-long wasn’t just stupid, but dangerous.  Space madness was far from a joke, and he had hours of footage to prove it.

Plus, it would keep him from thinking too hard about where he was right now, and what was humming against his chest.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _When your eyes are red_   
> _And emptiness is all you know_   
> _With the darkness fed_   
> _I will be your scarecrow_
> 
> \- Imagine Dragons, _Bleeding Out_

The alerts pushed him back to consciousness, lighting up in layers until they were too bright to ignore.  Rewind didn’t want to wake up; something in the back of his mind told him it was a bad idea, and not just because he wanted five more minutes.  But these weren’t appointment messages; they were warning alerts, for low fuel… among other things.  Things that couldn’t be ignored.

He onlined his optics, and immediately remembered why he’d wanted to sink back into the empty black of stasis.

Overlord’s spark still spun, warm and green and alive.  Energon was still leaking from his shattered frame to congeal along transformation seams and underneath warped plating.  Rewind was still bleeding out, on the razor’s edge of survival.

He’d decided he would do what it took to keep himself alive.  Whatever it took.

With his remaining hand, he reached out and squeezed a nearby fuel line between two fingers.

It needed some twisting, but he managed to unscrew the tube from the spark chamber without releasing his pinch-hold; fuel was precious, and he couldn’t afford to have it spill out into emptiness.  Only after Rewind snapped his mask open and slid the warm metal connector between his lips did he ease his fingers off the tubing, so the fluorescent liquid could flow.

It didn’t taste half as bad as it should’ve, but his mind supplied the appropriate strut-deep shudder of disgust.

Memories bubbled up, unbidden and unwanted. Drawing fuel from another mech, large and imposing, but with a spark that warmed him just by being in the same room.  Being cracked open, partially dismantled, to funnel the energon direction into his frame.  But even then, there was a feeling of confidence and security.  The first time he’d felt safe and cared for.  The first person to treat him as a Cybertronian, as an equal.

_Dominus..._

That first day, the sensation of his tank accepting the liquid without so much as a token protest had almost caused him to start sobbing.  He’d never known that refuelling could happen without pain, or understood why others took their energon with eagerness while he delayed as long as possible.  Once Dominus realized what was happening, and the cause behind it, he refused to allow Rewind to fuel himself with crude energon again.

He’d tried convincing Chromedome do to the same with him.  There was something unspeakably intimate about that kind of connection, feeling someone else’s life flowing into your frame...  But while he found it both visceral and enjoyable, his conjunx was uncomfortable with it, at best.  The archivist hadn’t wanted to push things, which meant he could count the number of times they’d done it one one hand.

The one hand he had left.

Rewind swallowed down as much as his tanks could hold, to avoid the need to repeat this for as long as possible, before pinching the tube shut and screwing it back into place.  He didn’t want to think about this.  He didn’t want to think at all.  Reactivating stasis protocols required only a few seconds, but sliding back into the blessed emptiness took a little longer.

This was all he had to do: wake, refuel, sleep, repeat.  Just keep doing it, until help arrived.  He wasn’t sure how much energon was left in Overlord, but with the enormous mech in stasis, it would last a long time.  Years.  Decades even.  Rewind required such a comparatively small amount, drops in the metaphorical bucket, that he doubted it would have much of an impact on the overall timeframe.  He could stay in stasis, except for those few minutes when he needed fuel, ignoring the passage of time.

He tried to push away the cold feeling that wrapped tendrils around his spark, and which had nothing to do with his core temperature.  Offlining his optics, the archivist allowed emptiness to claim him again.  Eventually, someone would find them.  Eventually, rescue would come.  All he had to do was wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I get the feeling there is going to be more, after this.
> 
> It might take a while, as I'm a slow writer. We'll see what happens.


End file.
